Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a participant or observer in the following events:

The transformative Civil Rights Act of 1964 passes Congress. The law makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, religion, or gender in voting, public places, the workplace, and schools. Former President John F. Kennedy had argued for new civil rights legislation, saying that previous legislative efforts (see August 29, 1957 and May 6, 1960) did not go far enough. Kennedy waited until 1963 to send his legislation to Congress, and was assassinated before the bill was passed. On June 11, 1963, Kennedy told the public, “The negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day; one-third as much chance of completing college; one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man; twice as much chance of becoming unemployed; about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year; a life expectancy which is seven years shorter; and the prospects of earning only half as much.” His successor, Lyndon Johnson, a conservative Southern Democrat, surprised many by pushing the bill instead of falling in line with conservative Southern Democrats who opposed it. Johnson and Senate leaders successfully fought back a filibuster by Senator Richard Russell (D-GA) and 17 other segregationist Democratic senators who tried to derail the bill; it passed the Senate on a 73-24 vote. Some believe that the passage of the bill is one of the major legislative acts that drives many Southern Democrats to leave the party for the increasingly conservative venue of the Republican Party. The word “sex,” to prohibit gender-based discrimination, was added to the legislation at the last minute by Representative Howard W. Smith (D-VA), and some accused Smith of inserting the provision as a means to kill the entire bill. Smith argued that he was supportive of efforts by women’s rights organizations, and inserted the language in a sincere effort to curb discrimination against women. Smith is joined by Representative Martha W. Griffiths (D-MI) in keeping the provision in the bill. Perhaps the most significant provision of the bill is the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), charged with implementing the law. The EEOC will use the practice of “affirmative action” to curb discrimination, including mandating hiring of minorities and women to alleviate many employers’ practice of hiring white males almost exclusively, especially for more senior positions. President Johnson will extend his support to “affirmative action,” and is perhaps the first public figure to use the phrase in addressing the public. [Spartacus Schoolnet, 2008; National Archives, 2012; American Civil Liberties Union, 2012]

The Department of Health and Human Services rescinds the controversial “conscience rule” that allows health care workers to refuse to provide abortion counseling or other family-planning services if doing so would violate their moral or religious beliefs. The rule was announced on December 19, 2008 as one of the Bush administration’s final policy initiatives. Seven states have already challenged the rule in court, arguing that it sacrifices the health of patients to religious beliefs of medical providers. The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology has reported numerous cases regarding the rule, including a Virginia mother of two who became pregnant after being denied emergency contraception, and a rape victim whose prescription for emergency contraception was rejected by a pharmacist. Obama officials say the administration will consider drafting a new rule to clarify what health care workers can reasonably refuse for patients. The public has 30 days to respond to the move before it becomes viable. Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, said in December that her organization supported the rule because in recent years “we have seen a variety of efforts to force Catholic and other health care providers to perform or refer for abortions and sterilizations.” However, opponents of the rule, including the American Medical Association, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, and Planned Parenthood, said it could have voided state laws requiring insurance plans to cover contraceptives and requiring hospitals to offer emergency contraception to rape victims. It could also allow drugstore employees to refuse to fill prescriptions for contraceptives. And the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already offers broad protection against discrimination based on religion, mandating that an employer must make reasonable accommodations for an employee’s practices and beliefs. Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood says, “Today’s action by the Obama administration demonstrates that this president is not going to stand by and let women’s health be placed in jeopardy.” [Chicago Tribune, 2/27/2009; New York Times, 2/27/2009]

Fox Business Channel host and commentator John Stossel says a key portion of the Civil Rights Act should be eliminated, because, he says, “[p]rivate businesses ought to get to discriminate.” [Media Matters, 5/20/2010; Media Matters, 9/7/2010] The 1964 Civil Rights Act (see July 2, 1964), signed into law by then-President Lyndon Johnson, prohibits discrimination in public places, provides for the integration of public schools and other public facilities, and makes employment discrimination illegal. [Media Matters, 9/7/2010; National Archives, 2011] Stossel, a guest on Fox News’s America Live, tells host Megyn Kelly that he agrees with libertarian Rand Paul, a Republican candidate for the US Senate, in recommending that the portion of the Civil Rights Act mandating no discrimination in public places should be repealed. (Both Paul and Stossel argue that the Americans with Disabilities Act should also be repealed—see May 17, 2010 and September 1, 2010). Paul has said: “[Y]ou should let businesses decide for themselves whether they are going to be racist or not racist. Because once the government gets involved, it’s a slippery slope.” When Kelly quotes this comment from Paul, Stossel says he is “in total agreement” with Paul, stating: “[I]f a private business wants to say, ‘We don’t want any blond anchorwomen or mustached guys,’ it ought to be their right. Are we going to say to the black students’ association they have to take white people, or the gay softball association they have to take straight people? We should have freedom of association in America.” (Kelly is a blond anchorwoman, and Stossel wears a mustache.) Kelly says: “When you put it like that it sounds fine, right? So who cares if a blond anchorwoman and mustached anchorman can’t go into the lunchroom. But as you know, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came around because it was needed. Blacks weren’t allowed to sit at the lunch counter with whites. They couldn’t, as they traveled from state to state in this country, they couldn’t go in and use a restroom. They couldn’t get severed meals and so on, and therefore, unfortunately in this country a law was necessary to get them equal rights.” Stossel notes that those “Jim Crow” doctrines “were government rules. Government was saying we have white and black drinking fountains. That’s very different from saying private people can’t discriminate.” Stossel says that business owners should be free to discriminate, and if the “free market” punishes them by costing them customers, then that is a fair way to handle it. Kelly says the time of the Civil Rights Act “was a different time. Racism and discrimination was rampant. I’m not saying it’s been eliminated. But it was rampant. It was before my time, before I was born, but obviously I’ve read history, and I know that there is something wrong when a person of color can’t get from state to state without stopping at a public restroom or a public lunchroom to have a sandwich.” Stossel says: “But the public restroom was run by the government, and maybe at the time that was necessary.… And I would go further than he was willing to go, as he just issued the statement, and say it’s time now to repeal that part of the law.… Because private businesses ought to get to discriminate. And I won’t won’t ever go to a place that’s racist and I will tell everybody else not to and I’ll speak against them. But it should be their right to be racist.” [Media Matters, 5/20/2010; Media Matters, 9/7/2010] Stossel’s position provokes considerable criticism, and the civil rights organization Color of Change calls for a boycott of Fox Business until it fires Stossel. The organization writes: “Stossel’s position is an affront to black America and everyone in this country who believes in racial progress. It’s one thing to be a candidate with backwards views [referring to Paul]. It’s another to be employed by a supposed news network and to use that platform to push hateful ideas that our nation repudiated decades ago. It’s time that Fox drop Stossel.” [Salem News, 5/22/2010] US Representative Bob Filner (D-CA), a veteran of civil rights protests, responds: “A ‘private’ business generally operates on a public thoroughfare, is protected by public police and fire departments, is served by public transportation, is staffed by people educated in public schools, is protected against fraud by the public justice system, may serve food or sell products protected by public inspection agencies, etc., etc., etc. Surely the public has a right to insist on non-racist policies! As a Freedom Rider in 1961, I rode on an interstate, publicly franchised Greyhound bus, and, as a member of an integrated group, was denied access to restrooms, lunch counters, and waiting rooms. The Supreme Court rightly ruled this was unconstitutional. Do Rand Paul and John Stossel want to take us back to a racist past from which so many people gave their lives to liberate us?” [Media Matters, 5/21/2010] Andrew Grant-Thomas, deputy director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, says that Stossel has fundamentally misrepresented history, stating, “Market forces hadn’t exactly made anti-black discrimination disappear during the several centuries before the Civil Rights Act.” Even with the progress made since the legislation took effect, Grant-Thomas says, racial discrimination is still a major problem. “If you look at any market for which we’ve done extensive studies, significant discrimination remains,” he says. “It’s clearly better than it was. But there’s still discrimination.” There is a strong market for businesses that “currently, and legally, discriminate on the basis of race, or other grounds, in their membership. That hasn’t caused them to go under. Indeed… in some key arenas, like housing and schools, some people pay more for segregated settings.” He concludes: “The Civil Rights Act wasn’t passed on economic grounds, but on moral and ethical grounds. Suggesting that market logic would have sufficed to weed out discriminators is pretty much besides the point in that respect.” [Media Matters, 5/20/2010] A clearly aggrieved Stossel will respond to the criticism (see July 2, 2010).

Fox Business Channel host and commentator John Stossel goes on Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor to defend his recent call to repeal a key element of the Civil Rights Act (see May 20-22, 2010). [Media Matters, 5/25/2010] The 1964 Civil Rights Act, signed into law by then-President Lyndon Johnson, prohibits discrimination in public places, provides for the integration of public schools and other public facilities, and makes employment discrimination illegal (see July 2, 1964). [Media Matters, 9/7/2010; National Archives, 2011] Host Bill O’Reilly is less than sympathetic to Stossel’s call for repeal, noting that one function of government is to protect its citizens, and this includes protecting them from discrimination, even at the hands of private businesses, which Stossel says should not be covered under the law. It is up to the government, O’Reilly says, to ensure every citizen’s “quality of life.” Stossel says he is a libertarian, and like most libertarians, he wants government to protect him from those who would physically hurt him, steal from him, and so forth. “But we want government out of our private lives,” he says, and to expect government to step in to “make life fair” is “an awful idea.” O’Reilly counters that the Declaration of Independence guarantees “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and discrimination denies targeted minorities that “pursuit of happiness.” Stossel, as he did earlier, insists that private businesses rarely if ever practice discrimination in this day and age, and those that do are quickly punished by “market forces”—customers refusing to patronize those businesses, for example. O’Reilly is adamant, saying, “I feel very strongly, if it’s open to the public, then the public has to be” allowed access. [Media Matters, 5/25/2010]

Fox Business Channel host and commentator John Stossel complains that his recent advocacy for the repeal of a key element of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (see May 20-22, 2010) is not racist or “hateful,” as at least one organization, Color of Change, has said. Stossel proclaims his incredulity at the reaction, and says that he actually condemns racism, not supports it. However, he says, he sees no need for government to prohibit racism—that the free market, left to its own devices, will weed out racist businesses and business owners because people will not patronize them. “Racial discrimination is bad. But we have ways besides government to end it. The free market often punishes racists. Today, a business that doesn’t hire blacks loses customers and good employees. It will atrophy, while its more inclusive competitors thrive.” He calls the organizations and individuals who criticized his call “the chattering class,” and asks if his freedom of speech is being threatened. America has changed since the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, Stossel says, and the need for government to prohibit discrimination on the part of private businesses has evaporated. Indeed, he says, government perpetuated racism, and private businesses and individuals ended it. He concludes: “Government is a blunt instrument of violence that one day might do something you like but the next day will do something you abhor. Better to leave things to us—people—acting together privately.” [WorldNetDaily, 6/2/2010]

The cover of ‘Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?’ [Source: Occidental Dissident (.com)]Conservative commentator and author Pat Buchanan publishes his latest book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? Kirkus Reviews, reviewing an advance copy, wrote before its public release that Buchanan “laments the fading of the Christian religion from American life because he sees it as an indispensable underpinning of our common culture.” Buchanan, the review notes, “fears the nation has abandoned its historic commitment to liberty and equality of opportunity to pursue a chimerical utopia of diversity and equality of result.” Buchanan does not actually predict the dissolution or destruction of America, but predicts “culture wars without end and a continuing self-segregation of Americans by ethnic group.” The review concludes: “Liberals may rightly dismiss this sprawling, often rambling book as nativist claptrap. Readers willing to excuse the nods to predictable right-wing shibboleths and bogeymen will find it a troubling analysis of how America has changed for the worse in the last half century, and how difficult it will be to pull it back from the loss of freedom and prosperity Buchanan sees not far ahead.” [Kirkus Reviews, 9/15/2011]Heavy Criticism for 'Racist' Content' - Jillian Rayfield of the progressive news Web site TPM Muckraker reprints what she calls twelve “pretty racist or just crazy quotes” from the book. One accuses Barack Obama of engaging in a “long and successful campaign to expel Christianity from the public square, diminish its presence in our public life, and reduce its role to that of just another religion.” Many focus on Buchanan’s prediction that white Americans will soon become a minority, and as a result, American culture will collapse. Another accuses black Americans of benefiting from “Jim Crow in reverse,” where whites are systematically and legally disenfranchised and oppressed by minorities. “Back then, black and white lived apart, went to different schools and churches, played on different playgrounds, and went to different restaurants, bars, theaters, and soda fountains. But we shared a country and a culture. We were one nation. We were Americans.” Liberal whites, Buchanan writes, “may discover what it is like to ride in the back of the bus.” The 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act took away key rights from white Americans, Buchanan asserts, instead of mandating equality for all Americans. Only before those laws took effect was America a nation of equality. Buchanan says that his desire to “expel” minorities is not racially motivated, merely an attempt to rescue American civilization and its “European majority.” He says that “49 of 50 muggings in New York City” are perpetrated by blacks. And he says that the Republican Party must become “the white party” if it is to retain its identity, arguing, “[W]hy should Republicans be ashamed to represent the progeny of the men who founded, built, and defended America since her birth as a nation?” [TPM Muckraker, 10/24/2011] Jeneba Ghatt of the Washington Times accuses Buchanan of repackaging long-disproven stereotypes of non-whites’ genetic and intellectual inferiority. “Anyone can attempt to sell books delivering doomsday-like message based on racist pseudo-Eugenics-based theories as Buchanan,” she writes. “Organizing, galvanizing, and trying to make a colossal effort to effectuate real change is a genuine challenge.” Instead of trying to change society for the better, she writes, Buchanan is “playing that old tired game of scapegoat.” Many Times commenters post scathing rebuttals to Ghatt’s article, citing “scientific” evidence of whites’ and Asians’ intellectual superiority over blacks and Hispanics, with one post calling Ghatt, an African-American, “still a slave” because she advocates equality for blacks. Others attack her given name as un-American and question why the Times would print her material. [Washington Times, 10/23/2011] Janet Shan of The Moderate Voice notes the bluntly racial and racist material in a chapter entitled “The End of White America,” where Buchanan cites statistics showing that within a few generations, whites in America will be a minority, largely because of the increasing number of non-white immigrants and whites being “outbred” by minority citizens. Buchanan focuses strongly on Hispanic-Americans, writing: “Mexico is moving north.… Will this Mexican nation within a nation advance the goals of the Constitution—to ‘insure domestic tranquility’ and ‘make us a more perfect union’? Or have we imperiled our union?” Shan responds: “In other words, America is heading for disaster since whites won’t be a majority. Really? Only Pat Buchanan could make a black or Latino feel dirty, just because of the color of their skin.” In a later chapter, “Equality vs. Freedom,” Buchanan claims that “the end to segregation and the legislated equality of rights for African Americans” have led to a “socialist utopia” and the collapse of everything he values about American society. Shan writes: “Is he condoning Jim Crow, segregation, and racial injustice in this country? Gee, I can’t seem to remember hearing Pat Buchanan’s name being mentioned in the struggle for racial justice and equality. Every time he is embroiled in controversy it is because of racially motivated comments emanating from his lips on national television. So, I guess, in other words, inequality is just fine for Pat Buchanan and his posse. Just as long as the white right-wing evangelicals are calling the shots.” She concludes: “Pat Buchanan is of the viewpoint that we can never create a nation in which all the races, tribes, cultures, and creeds of Earth are all equal. That utopia can never exist.… We can’t all be equal but that doesn’t mean we lose sight of the Biblical truth of taking care of the least among us. That doesn’t mean we can’t give each child the opportunity to succeed despite the color of his or her skin. I will say, this was a very riveting book and I suspect it will be a New York Times bestseller, but the racial undertones will continue to fan the flames of distrust and hatred for everything Pat Buchanan stands for.” [Janet Shan, 10/14/2011]Conservative Support - At GoodReads (.com), reviewer John Caneday “admire[s]” Buchanan’s “Christian wisdom” as shown in the book, and writes: “He recognizes the spiritual decline in America is responsible for the cultural and political decline we are experiencing now.… He argues that the flood of third world immigration into the Western nations is one of the greatest forces for destruction in the modern world.… Many will charge Buchanan with racism, but the careful reader will realize that Buchanan sees these forces at work in every culture and every nation on earth. Diversity cannot possibly be a source of strength, as everywhere there is diversity, there is conflict.” [John Caneday, 12/15/2011] Free Republic (.com) blogger William L. Houston calls the book “the bluntest and most cogent statement of the truth about the present course of Western civilization that has been seen in American bookstores in many years.… Everything that real conservatives have privately known to be true for generations is finally aired in this brave and long overdue new book.” Buchanan calls the American left “a utopian death cult” bent on destroying America before it destroys itself. “The Baby Boomer elite that was captured by the counterculture in the 1960s has set America on a course to national oblivion: radical multiculturalism, open borders, the welfare state, affirmative action, the obsession with diversity, the embrace of the sick and degenerate ‘free love movement,’ the embrace of abortion and family planning, the embrace of an adversary secular culture that has flatly declared war on Christianity. As a historian, Pat Buchanan is here to remind us of the awful truth that this sort of progressive worldview and the lifestyle that accompanies it has consequences.” Whites are carrying non-white Americans “on [their] back[s]” now, Houston asserts; when “freedom loving European-Christian Americans” become the minority in America in 2042, the economy and the social underpinnings of America will collapse entirely. “Black America is culturally and economically a basket case,” Houston writes. “Hispanic America is worse off in some ways, better in others. White America has gone completely off the rails under the influence of the counterculture. Even Asian America has been negatively affected by the sickness of the dominant culture.” Whites are genetically and environmentally superior, Houston argues, and must continue to steer the nation to ensure its survival. [William L. Houston, 10/31/2011]Praise from White Supremacists - Conservative blogger Hunter Wallace, a neo-Confederate and white supremacist, posts a lengthy, favorable review of the book, saying that it is Buchanan’s “boldest affront yet to the reigning racial and cultural taboos of Black Run Amerika.” Wallace, like Buchanan, focuses much of his attention on American minorities, decrying the fact that “[b]y 2042, White Americans are scheduled to become a minority in the United States.” He continues: “African-American and Hispanic tax consumers are becoming more aggressive and explicitly racial in their agenda. White taxpayers are becoming more defensive. The myth of a ‘post-racial’ society is collapsing. White racial attitudes are hardening again.” Both political parties, according to Buchanan and Wallace, are in danger of being overrun by what they call “officially aggrieved minorities,” especially since white birthrates are declining. America, a fundamentally Christian nation in their view, is also under siege from non-Christian religions and ideologies, and as a result, the “Western culture” that once sustained the nation “has collapsed and nihilism and chaos now reign in the realm of morality. Secular fantasy ideologies like liberalism, humanism, and communism have moved into the vacuum of faith. America is disintegrating as a nation because its people no longer share a common moral tradition. Instead, they bark at each other from across the ‘partisan divide.’ This is the inevitable prelude to our demise as a nation-state.” America’s economic system has become irrevocably corrupted, Buchanan and Wallace assert, by “a confused hybrid” of “liberal capitalist democracy [and] Marxism.” Gay rights, interracial marriage, the American celebration of diversity, and other “corrosive” phenomena, they observe, are heralding the final collapse of American culture, where “the scum of society” is allowed “to punch through the traditional racial, cultural, and religious restraints that have held degeneracy in check for generations and to rise to elite status in the former countries of Western civilization.” Wallace notess Buchanan’s failure to address what he calls “the Jewish question,” but says Buchanan’s decision to do so was “wise” “because 50 percent of American Jewry is scheduled to vacate the earth by 2050.” Wallace concludes, “Buchanan clearly believes that America will be torn apart by ethnonationalism in the 21st century in much the same that Europe was torn about by ethnonationalism in the 20th century,” and says the white, Christian values of “Middle America” are the only ideology that will “save” the nation. [Hunter Wallace, 10/26/2011] Steve Sailer, one of the owners of the white supremacist Web site VDare (.com), lauds Buchanan as a personal friend who “quotes me several times, citing my VDARE.com articles on the ‘racial ratio’—Affirmative Action beneficiaries vs. benefactors i.e. losers—and the real meaning of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores among others.” Sailer praises Buchanan’s “genial honesty” in the book as well as his “bareknuckles” approach to the “truth” of the “decline” of American culture. After spending much of his review lambasting Barack Obama and the American left, Sailer concludes that Buchanan “is now perhaps the wisest, most objective-minded man in American public affairs.” [Steve Sailer, 10/19/2011]

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